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SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits

Public databases in taxonomy, phylogenetics and geographic and fossil occurrence records are key research tools that provide raw materials, on which broad-scale analyses and synthesis in their respective fields are based. Comparable repositories for natural history observations are rare. Publicly av...

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Autor principal: Grundler, Michael C.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Pensoft Publishers 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7125237/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32269478
http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e49943
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author Grundler, Michael C.
author_facet Grundler, Michael C.
author_sort Grundler, Michael C.
collection PubMed
description Public databases in taxonomy, phylogenetics and geographic and fossil occurrence records are key research tools that provide raw materials, on which broad-scale analyses and synthesis in their respective fields are based. Comparable repositories for natural history observations are rare. Publicly available natural history data on traits like diet, habitat and reproduction are scattered across an extensive primary literature and remain relatively inaccessible to researchers interested in using these data for broad-scale analyses in macroecology and macroevolution. In this paper, I introduce SquamataBase, an open-source R package and database of predator-prey records involving the world’s snakes. SquamataBase facilitates the discovery of natural history observations for use in comparative analyses and synthesis and, in its current form, contains observations of at least 18,304 predator individuals comprising 1,227 snake species and at least 58,633 prey items comprising 3,231 prey taxa. To facilitate integration with comparative analysis workflows, the data are distributed inside an R package, which also provides basic functionality for common data manipulation and filtering operations. Moving forward, the continued development of public natural history databases and their integration with existing digitisation efforts in biodiversity science should become a priority.
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spelling pubmed-71252372020-04-08 SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits Grundler, Michael C. Biodivers Data J R Package Public databases in taxonomy, phylogenetics and geographic and fossil occurrence records are key research tools that provide raw materials, on which broad-scale analyses and synthesis in their respective fields are based. Comparable repositories for natural history observations are rare. Publicly available natural history data on traits like diet, habitat and reproduction are scattered across an extensive primary literature and remain relatively inaccessible to researchers interested in using these data for broad-scale analyses in macroecology and macroevolution. In this paper, I introduce SquamataBase, an open-source R package and database of predator-prey records involving the world’s snakes. SquamataBase facilitates the discovery of natural history observations for use in comparative analyses and synthesis and, in its current form, contains observations of at least 18,304 predator individuals comprising 1,227 snake species and at least 58,633 prey items comprising 3,231 prey taxa. To facilitate integration with comparative analysis workflows, the data are distributed inside an R package, which also provides basic functionality for common data manipulation and filtering operations. Moving forward, the continued development of public natural history databases and their integration with existing digitisation efforts in biodiversity science should become a priority. Pensoft Publishers 2020-03-27 /pmc/articles/PMC7125237/ /pubmed/32269478 http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e49943 Text en Michael C. Grundler http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle R Package
Grundler, Michael C.
SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title_full SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title_fullStr SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title_full_unstemmed SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title_short SquamataBase: a natural history database and R package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
title_sort squamatabase: a natural history database and r package for comparative biology of snake feeding habits
topic R Package
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7125237/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32269478
http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e49943
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